Firstly, I’m going to distinhuish between content that is viral and memes. The simplest way to put it is that viral content is replicated without remix – ie passed on from person to person retaining its original form. Internet memes- which as I’m sure you all know comes from the term meme coined by Richard Dawkins to describe how an idea is passed form person to person – are ever evolving, subject to remix, reinterpretation and are more cosely a ffj liated with narrative and folklore. In internet meme then is more mode of delivery, to revert to biological terms maybe more of a genus or family than a distinct species.
This is an example of a type of internet meme – called an image macro. Its discinct characteristics include a recognisable back ground image, and top and bottom text. This is called conspiracy keanu, and as this meme travels around the picture remains the same, whist the text changes, like this
And there are thousands of distinct memes, many of which are aggregated on sites like know your meme
Each of which is subject to thousands of ri fg s and remixes
You may reember grumpy cat. And you’ll know that cats are a big thing online. They anthropomorphise well. There’s a bit of itnernet history to this
Caturday. Caturday was a weekly event on a site called 4chan, where users submitted funny images of cats on a Saturday. For those unfamiliar with 4chan it’s a very popular imiage based message board, which consists of subject specific forums, to which users can post content anonymously. Certain boards such as b, or the random board have gained notoriety due to the disturbing content that is posted there – gore, porn, creepshops, peadophiliic images – as a result of its liassez faire posting policy. Not all board on fourchan opereate thsiway, some are quie strict. Which is why they are not so infamous. 4chan was in the news recenlty due to its incolvement in the celebrity nude leak epidode.
But back to caturday for a moment, as I want to look at some of the ways that participant identified themselves of members,or successfuk memebers of this participatory culture/.
And I’d like to start by focusing on the language – the I can haz variert of lol speak. So it’s a perposefully a grammatical vernacular which sucessful particparn can adopt to when participating
Comic sans
Polphony next
Red shirt
Red shirt
Red shirt
Monetised - openly
Polyphony, humour, shared experiences, community building. Humour, irony, cannot be picked up via machine learning. Google translate analogy
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